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Architects: knof
- Area: 77 m²
- Year: 2017
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Photographs:Haruki Kodama
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Manufacturers: Vectorworks
Text description provided by the architects. We've purchased the 33-year-old condominium with views of the Koto Canal in three directions and renovated the four-bedroom unit into a one-room unit that integrates work and residence. The plan was to overlap the living and working areas rather than separating, and the nine fittings that appeared, as a result, were treated like a canvas for a "fusuma (sliding door)" painting. This 33-year-old condominium surveys the canal on the south, west, and north sides. The former four-bedroom unit was renovated into a one-room unit that integrates work and residence.
Considering the use of the space as a home and office, clearly dividing the limited area of 80 square meters into two halves would limit the range of activities of the residents/workers. As a result of the search for a plan that maximizes the overlap between "living" and "working," it became the single room that is loosely connected from the office space to the bedroom. Since the majority of the room acts as an office, we did not want to actively show elements that would give the impression of daily life (bathroom, toilet, walk-in closet, novels and comics, etc.). As a result of placing them on the side of the wall without a window, a series of nine fittings that traverse the room appeared. Those nine fittings are a set of practical doors separating public and private spaces, but also look like a horizontal screen with a ratio of 4:1 that traverses the room as a whole. How should we handle this screen?
When one confronts Hasegawa Tohaku's Pine Trees screen, it feels like one is standing in the foggy space inside the painting. Barrier paintings such as fusuma-e (sliding door paintings) and byobu-e (folding screen paintings) can create a "depth out of phase" that differs from the xyz axis, depending on their size and the interaction between the scene depicted and the viewer's imagination. We believe that Japanese barrier painting culture has an aspect of acquiring an augmented reality sense of depth with its development, in which people's imaginations move back and forth through space. Here, the aforementioned nine consecutive fittings were treated as a canvas for the fusuma paintings. We wanted to create a new depth within the concrete box of a condominium room in the city.
We decided to use a whale as a motif of the painting, because of our interests in a scale far removed from human living space and its combination with the canal, and asked the artist, Saki Ikeda, to design the fusuma. The original drawing, about 40 cm wide and meticulously drawn with a drawing pen, was enlarged and printed directly on lauan plywood using a special large-scale printer. The lauan selected at a warehouse in Shin-Kiba was rough in grain and color, which is not usually appreciated for use in the normal field, however, here the rough grain of the wood was used to express the waves.
The relationship between the canal outside the window and the whale in the fusuma painting are just like the one between the garden and the fusuma paintings in the sub-temple of Zen, where the viewer (= resident/worker) repeatedly comes and goes between the spaces, drifting through the depths of reality and imagination. The canvas of the fusuma (the sliding door part of the fittings) was made to be replaceable by the resident, in the same manner as the original fusuma. For example, a sliding door of Shikunshien (an old building in Kyoto) can transform the atmosphere of a space completely by being replaced with a noren-do (a sliding door made of bamboo blinds) in the summer. By replacing the canvas part, it is possible to experience a different depth of space.
